Greenwich offers its goodbye

Lauren Bessette, sister memorialized in their hometown

Published: Sunday, July 25, 1999

GREENWICH, Conn. {AP} With bouquets and hand-written notes, residents Saturday bid a final, heartbreaking farewell to the Bessette sisters, who perished with John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash in the Atlantic.

In the week since the accident, there have been countless eulogies for the 38-year-old son of Camelot.

But tributes to the lesser-known Bessettes have seemed shadowy at best, Carolyn and Lauren remembered not so much for how they lived their lives as for what they became in death a footnote in another Kennedy tragedy.

Not here in Greenwich, the affluent shoreline town where the Bessettes grew up. Here memories are personal. Here people spoke of two remarkable daughters, two promise-filled futures. And the unspeakable sorrow of parents forced to bury their children.

"Devastating," said Chuck Morrell, the chief sexton of Christ Church, where a private memorial service for the Bessette sisters was to be held Saturday evening.

"Two daughters who were living life to the fullest. No parent should have to bear such a loss," Morrell said as he fingered the long wooden candlesticks that dominate the end of each crimson cushioned pew.

"John, Carolyn and Lauren," the note read. "Our thoughts and prayers are with you."

Next to it, a bunch of wildflowers lay over a child's drawing of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Significantly, the candlelight service is intended to focus on Lauren the "other Bessette," the victim the world knew least although prayers will also be offered for Carolyn and John, church staff said.

Brilliant and beautiful, Lauren earned her business degree from the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. The 34-year-old investment banker rose rapidly in the world of international finance and worked for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in New York for eight years. She specialized in Asian investments and was based in Hong Kong until about a year ago.

She would probably never have been buried at sea in a stately ceremony aboard a navy destroyer with a folded American flag except for the fact that her glamorous 33-year-old sister had married a Kennedy.

Instead, Lauren might have had a grave-site, a place her parents and twin sister, Lisa Ann, could visit and remember the slender brunette with an infectious smile. In the end, her ashes were flung to the waves along with those of her sister and famous brother-in-law.

More than 400 guests were invited to the ecumenical service, but neither the family nor the church would comment on who was on the guest list, or who would deliver eulogies. Already, television cameras and crew were camped behind police barricades across the road from the church.

Ann Freeman, the Bessette sisters' mother, and Dr. Richard Freeman, their stepfather, were expected to attend, along with Lisa Ann.